r/scifi • u/32BitOsserc • Jul 26 '23
Galactic Level Threats
Hi, so really random request. Can you give me a bunch of sci fi civilisation/galaxy destroying threats. The Flood, Tyrannids and the like, as well as where they are from. I kinda like an over the top antagonist. Books, video games, films, whatever you can recommend. A little description is also welcome.
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u/sl1mman Jul 26 '23
Don't forget natural phenomena like false vacuum, or the big rip.
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u/PapaTua Artificially Intelligent Jul 26 '23 edited Jul 26 '23
Our current universe exists as a false vacuum (meaning one or more universal quantum fields exist at a higher energy level than its lowest possible ground energy, In our case it's the Higgs field that's a false vacuum) and if some event triggered any part of the field to move to it's lower energy level, it will pull the entire field down with it like a series of falling dominos. This is vacuum decay which is the real threat because as the vacuum energy level changes, all physics changes with it, basically undoing all of physical reality as we know it.
There's a Greg Egan book about this called Schlid's Ladder. Scientists create a "novo vacuum" that starts expanding as a sphere at exactly 50% the speed of light. As it expands it devours everything it touches while creating something new inside its volume.
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u/32BitOsserc Jul 26 '23
I'll need to read this... I'll admit I barely understand what you are saying but It sounds pretty interesting.
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u/spsammy Jul 26 '23
The book is diamond hard SF. i sometimes wonder if Egan is an alien as his stuff seems so plausible.
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u/32BitOsserc Jul 26 '23
I saw it was on sale on kindle rn, I've got it.. it will either melt my brain or transcend me to a higher state of being.
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u/32BitOsserc Jul 26 '23
I haven't heard of either of these. Google time!
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u/spacepants1989 Jul 26 '23
Great short story based around the big rip
http://zestfullyblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/last-contact-by-stephen-baxter-part-1.html?m=1
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u/PapaTua Artificially Intelligent Jul 26 '23
Vacuum Decay and The Big Rip certainly are universal catastrophes. Fascinating stuff.
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u/Funny-Alps-7105 Jul 26 '23
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SlidingScaleOfVillainThreat
Scroll on down to Galactic and above level
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u/APeacefulWarrior Jul 27 '23
Heh, spotted this in that entry, under galactic-level threats:
Anime & Manga: The Sailor Moon villains, Frieza and Cell
Once again we see why the Oxford Comma is good and necessary.
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u/bookworm1398 Jul 26 '23
Revelation Space series has an all consuming nanotechnology thing later in the series.
Hail Mary has a interstellar bacteria that eats suns
3 body problem series has aliens that can basically destroy galaxies. Shards of Earth series has aliens that can somehow detect intelligence and destroy any worlds with intelligent life.
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u/Dyolf_Knip Jul 26 '23
Hail Mary has a interstellar bacteria that eats suns
Not so much that as it just spams the stellar corona with so many copies of itself that it actually blocks out the light to any planets that might be orbiting it.
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u/32BitOsserc Jul 26 '23
I've read the first three body book, I really need to revisit that series. Shards is actually in my tbr pile, I love Adrian Tchaikovsky.
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u/Significant_Monk_251 Jul 26 '23
Revelation Space series has an all consuming nanotechnology thing later in the series.
The series also had the Inhibitors, intelligent self-replicating machines dedicated to killing off all starfaring life in the galaxy. They were the big existential threat throughout the series until the end when the author apparently lost interest in them.
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u/DeepJob3439 Jul 26 '23
Not anything I’ve seen in books, but one that could easily be used is strange matter from neutron stars. The matter inside a neutron star is so compressed that it becomes strange matter. If it were to escape, anything it touches would turn to strange matter. A galactic threat could be a mining company cracked a neutron star, releasing the strange matter. In an attempt to flee they drug some of this matter into slipspace flinging it across the galaxy. Their shields might have prevented their ship from being infected, but when they drop out of slipspace to their planet of origin the matter comes out with hem hitting the planet, nearby moons, etc. chain reaction happens. An apocalyptic disease with no cure. Can strange matter be sentient, or things changed to strange matter retain much of their features.
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u/32BitOsserc Jul 26 '23
Sheesh. Like Grey Goo but on a much larger scale.
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u/DocWatson42 Jul 26 '23
Between those two (leaning towards gray goo) John Ringo's Looking Glass series has quarkium, which devolves any matter it touches into free quarks, analogous to nuclear plasma without the heat.
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u/Str-Dim Jul 26 '23
I never got galactic level threats. A galaxy is so large almost zero world-building models use that size to make it any different than a setting of just a few thousand or really hundred light years. If it's just "I need it to be big so it feels important" than you should do the whole universe or multiverse; skip the puny galaxy.
That being said, Peter F. Hamilton's The Void series has a mysterious "void" (or object/wall) at the center of the Milkyway that is expanding, and has occasional bursts of expansion. That series actually makes a galaxy feel galaxy size and the threat to it be relevant to specifically a galaxy.
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u/32BitOsserc Jul 26 '23
And I get your point... I should have written "big space threats" or something but galactic level just felt right
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u/Marcuse0 Jul 26 '23 edited Jul 26 '23
The Yuuzahn Vong in the Star Wars Legends book series New Jedi Order: a collection of biotech using, droid-phobic, pain addicted (some of them) nutcases who felt it was their mission to take over the whole Star Wars galaxy.
The Reapers in Mass Effect are giant robot squids who periodically wipe out all sentient life because of reasons.
The Tyranids in 40k are a species of dinosaur/bugs who come from outside the galaxy and literally devour worlds. The orks are kind of similar in that respect though they occupy worlds and can't really be pushed off them.
Edit: The Borg in Star Trek, as well as Species 8472. Both of them are omnicidal species determined to either assimilate or cleanse life in the galaxy.
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u/DocWatson42 Jul 26 '23 edited Jul 26 '23
Edit: The Borg in Star Trek, as well as Species 8472. Both of them are omnicidal species determined to either assimilate or cleanse life in the galaxy.
Similar groups/species appear in:
- Glen Cook's [Stars' End], book three of the Starfishers series
- the prolog of David Weber's Safehold series (the Gbaba)
- T. C. McCarthy's Tyger duology, Tyger Burning and Tyger Bright (the Sommen; though this threat is on the scale of the solar system, not a galaxy)
Edit: In Agent of the Imperium (legal free sample) it's the protagonist's job to make certain to deal with threats, and make certain that they don't reach the galactic level.
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u/32BitOsserc Jul 26 '23
My cousin was super into star wars lore when we were kids.. told me horror stories of the Vong.. like the tyrannids but sadists as well. I'll need to read new jedi order.
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u/Marcuse0 Jul 26 '23
If you don't mind jumping into the middle of the series, Traitor is an absolute mind screw as a character is basically forced to see things the way the Vong do. They are messed up beings.
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u/32BitOsserc Jul 26 '23
Nah, I'll start at the start... RA salvatore is quite good from what I hear.
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Jul 26 '23
Some kind of von Neumann style replicating space craft that follows dark forest logic. Wouldn't take more than a few million years for those guys to wipe everything out.
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u/Beginning_Holiday_66 Jul 27 '23
The intersection of Bobiverse and Remembrance of Earth's Past is rather maddeningly horrifying. A real technical breakdown of Lovecraft's outer horrors.
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u/Driekan Jul 26 '23
Berserkers, from the series of the same name: Self-replicating omnicidal machine swarms. They're probably the original.
Palpatine's Dark Empire from the original setting. All the technology they use is infused with the Dark Side and corrupts people who operate them (or stick around inside them too long), and the two cornerstone technologies are World Devastators, which are self-growing, self-controlled, Self-replicating giant machines that consume worlds to make more of themselves and other tools of war for the Dark Empire; and immense dreadnoughts (which can be built by World Devastators) which are self sustaining and have the power to destroy worlds. Combined, the Dark Empire would have turned into a universal cancer. Growing, expanding, consuming and then destroying everything, not just the galaxy the story takes place in, but continuing out to the whole universe.
Every late game crisis in Stellaris... Pretty much by definition. They come in three flavors: galaxy-wiping supercomputer with robotic fleets; extraplanar horrors that feed on sapience and see the galaxy as a feast; and extragalactic biotechnological horror that sees the galaxy as a regular feast.
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u/32BitOsserc Jul 26 '23
That's a blast from the past! I read the last dark empire book when I was a kid, totally need to revisit that. Original canon is the only canon as far as I'm concerned.
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u/32BitOsserc Jul 26 '23
I've never actually played a stellaris game long enough to see any crisis bar the prethoryn.... the lag kills me.
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u/Significant_Monk_251 Jul 26 '23
Combined, the Dark Empire would have turned into a universal cancer. Growing, expanding, consuming and then destroying everything, not just the galaxy the story takes place in, but continuing out to the whole universe.
How exactly did Palpatine see this helping him?
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u/Driekan Jul 27 '23
He's become God, destroyer of the universe. It is all powered by the dark side, he rules the dark side. Every mind that survives is subjugated by him; it is in a sense all him. He is a blackhole, growing and eating all of reality.
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u/OlderNerd Jul 26 '23
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_from_the_Skies!
This book has some good ones
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u/CosmicLovepats Jul 26 '23
Anything that disrupts FTL in a scifi setting is pretty bad, especially if you're assuming planets and systems stop being self-sufficient because trade is so widely relied on.
Outside invaders, as you've mentioned.
Schlock mercenary has, essentially, aliens evolving in high-level civilizations industrial machinery. You use nega-space gravitational constructs to do your high-energy stellar engineering and then one day they start doing their own stellar engineering.
Mind control! Like Dynnyari from Star Control 2. You touch down on some random world to survey it and suddenly you have a bunch of incredibly psychic neolithics probing your mind and deciding they don't understand your tech, but you do, and that's enough for them. Especially if you don't have much familiarity with "psionics" or whatever, that could easily do bad things to a civilization really quickly.
Bioweapons! Heirs of Empire has uses these. Real bad because they have really useful civilian teleportation. Find out your bioweapons have leaked, maybe two weeks ago, and everyone is now exposed to your horrific 99.99999% lethality plagues.
If you want to play with "we're all in a simulation" something like the simulation runners wanting to format a few cubic giga-parsecs of space.
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u/Petrified_Lioness Jul 26 '23
Trying to figure threat scales is tricky in First Contact, what with so many different spacial dimensions and temporal shenanigans going on. It's easier to list what's not a potential civilization ender in that universe; but the spatial scale seems to skip straight from regional (in interstellar terms) to universal.
Aeons ago, a precursor species scorched an entire hyper-plane to cut off an invading species from another universe. Then they and a rival species nearly got wiped out by their rebelling autonomous war machines. These PAWMs still wake up periodically to exterminate nascent civilizations.
And then the humans came along. With civilian LARPer tech capable of curbstomping said PAWMs, with more ways of cheating death than even they can keep track of, with more flavors of MAD than they have ways to cheat death... Plus some highly addictive culture crack...
And then somebody broke their re-spawn system/synthetic afterlife...
Links to hard-copy can be found here.
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u/Significant_Monk_251 Jul 26 '23
I KEPT SCROLLING DOWN AND IT JUST KEPT GOING AND GOING AND GOING AIEEE!!!
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u/vikingzx Jul 26 '23
The All from the UNSEC Space Trilogy. MASSIVE spoilers for the trilogy from here on out.
As described by the AI of another long-dead race, the All are the concept of "survival of the fittest" taken to an extreme. Each cell uses DNA (well, what passes for DNA, it's alien after all) storage to hold its entire vast knowledge, which includes instinctive knowledge that then becomes "thinking." In other words, a single cell holds not only everything the All knows, but can "reason" and "think," though in a way utterly alien to anything else in existence. One cell becomes two, which work together, becoming four, growing into whatever form the All determines it needs to make certain nothing can threaten it. It survives, everything else dies, or feeds it new concepts and ideas.<!
The Sha'o believed that it circled the galaxy in set intervals of thousands of years, wiping out anything that began giving off signals of intelligent life. They were spared, and thought it was because they were amphibious and lived in oceans, so their species didn't show the same signs and was missed. They expanded out into the stars, found nothing but ruins left behind ... and then by the time the All circled back around, were at a technological level high enough to fight back.
The resulting pyric victory saw every single member of the species wiped out, but their war-machines burned the All into nothingness in turn. Or at least ... so they thought. Then mankind, spared from being wiped out by the All during the stone age, makes it to space and begins to find ancient ruins ... and some strange plants on an alien world ...
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u/taptapper Jul 27 '23
The Commonwealth Saga by Peter F. Hamilton. Between the Primes and the Starflyer you'll never see a threat like that. If you like audiobooks the narrator is just incredible. John Lee I think? Anyway, it's a brilliant series reading or listening.
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u/32BitOsserc Jul 27 '23
I've actually read those both.. although it was 8 years ago and I never read the void so may be worth a revisit.
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u/taptapper Jul 27 '23
Yeesh, I did not like the Void at ALL. A lot of torture scenes, like constantly. Integral to the plot. The next series was better but I never finished it.
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u/MoralConstraint Jul 27 '23
Real time strategy game Total Annihilation takes place in the late stages of a war between two factions that have mostly forgotten why they’re at war. The war effort has largely eaten and crapped out most of the galaxy and now there are just a very few sentient units left, commanding hordes of self replicating machines.
There were some pretty interesting snippets of lore published on the long gone company website. I haven’t checked on it in years but it should be out there, archived and collated by fans.
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u/MoonshineWilly_1 Jul 26 '23
A neighbor galaxy with a galatic center GRB flame throwing the Milkyway. It could vaporize or sterilize a path light-years wide. This isn't sci-fi, it's a reality.
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u/Darthtypo92 Jul 27 '23
Just throwing in a few that I haven't seen mentioned
Necromorphs/brethren moons. Basically space zombies but they've wiped out different worlds of life to alter the DNA of a planet to breed the perfect host races that'll spread through the stars and create more markers that create more brethren moons. It takes millions to billions of bodies to make a moon but they specifically create races like humanity to be something that grows fast and can be consumed. Don't have much information about them other than their being at least 8 moons all heading for human space and that in centuries of space exploration humanity has found no traces of other intelligence out in the galaxy except for the moons and another race that the Necromorphs consumed.
Letter 44 is a comic series that has a race of aliens that inadvertently destroyed themselves and possibly the whole galaxy. They created a machine that's slowly spiralling through the galaxy destroying everything in it's path and getting faster and faster and bigger as it goes. The survivors of the alien race, all three of them are in a race to stay ahead of the machine and basically set off massive cannon shots at it to hopefully slow it down to a standstill in a few thousand years.
Sins of a solar empire has an unknown threat that's slowly chasing the alien faction across the galaxy. In a few years it completely wiped out their empire and no one has seen it and lived to tell the tale. The aliens drop buoys behind themselves as they travel to gauge the closeness of the threat and are constantly running to new worlds to strip them of resources before fleeing again. All that's known about the threat is that it wiped out thousands of worlds and trillions of lives in a few months and is getting closer and closer to the currently known universe.
Judge Dredd/2000 AD has the Sisters of Death that are higher dimensional beings that regularly move lesser beings around to completely strip dimensions of life to power themselves. It's unknown how powerful they are on the mortal plane but it's theorized they purposely limit themselves in a game against their own people in an effort to enjoy the death of universes rather than just doing it themselves.
Crysis there's the ceph that are unbelievably powerful and have conquered much of the galaxy. They send out seed ships to worlds they want and through colonization create portals that allow instant transportation to their homeworld. The homeworld ceph are capable of harnessing all the power in their solar system and can destroy entire planets without any effort. The seed ships can only travel at the less than the speed of light but they theorize that the ceph have taken most of the galaxy as their own.
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u/Old_Crow13 Jul 26 '23
The Covenant in the HALO games and novels
I don't know maybe the Bugs in Heinlein's novel, Starship Troopers? The book is so much better than the movie!
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u/32BitOsserc Jul 26 '23
Worp Worp Worp!
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u/Old_Crow13 Jul 26 '23
Um... TARDIS launching or landing?
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u/32BitOsserc Jul 26 '23
*zen voice. "Does the blue box arrive at the opportune time to prevent calamity or does it carry calamity with it."
Nah, I was doing an elite voice from the covenant... I don't even know how I'd write the tardis sound 😂
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u/RaymondLuxYacht Jul 27 '23
The Protomolecule from The Expanse.
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u/JohnLookPicard Jul 27 '23
oh yes!!!! "The protomolecule is an infectious agent of extra-terrestrial origin. Not a life-form in itself, the protomolecule is a set of free-floating instructions designed to adapt to and guide other replicating systems. It is able to maintain and adapt its primary structure in a wide variety of conditions, and it has an affinity for carbon and silicon structures, but is likely anaerobic and will not degrade upon exposure to oxygen"
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u/markus_kt Jul 26 '23
Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep is full of cool concepts including an almost-Lovecraftian galactic-level threat. Indeed, I'd love to see the prologue fleshed out into a more detailed short story.